Imagine being an eight-year old boy, walking to school,
and as you come close, close to the roadblock you have to pass every day,
army jeeps are everywhere, blocking the roadblock and the gate.
You have to squeeze past the jeeps on one side, or squeeze between the two,
just to pass the roadblock, just one of the obstacles installed by Israeli forces,
as an everyday reminder that you’re the occupied, the ‘less human’,
the people the occupying army is trying so hard to displace.
Your only fault: being born Palestinian.

The burning down of more than 100 Kenyan secondary schools nationwide, set ablaze by unknown assailants in July 2016 and during the public school year’s second term, will make 2016 go down in history as Kenya’s most destructive year.

What began as student unrest in a Kisii County school, after administrators denied pupils a chance to watch the Euro Cup finals, spread across the country. Innocent Kenyans assumed students were just expressing their displeasure by burning a school.

Earlier this year the government urged universities to reduce the ‘drop-out’ rates of Black students. With Black students 50% more likely to drop out than their peers, the universities minister Jo Johnson argued that “there needs to be much greater support” for ‘BME’ students. Yet this seems little more than rhetoric, and reflects only a superficial interest in racial equality.

The idea of ‘support’ presupposes that drop-out rates are a consequence of the failures of individual Black students. This is a misunderstanding. Rather than ‘supporting’ individual Black students, the government should turn its attention to the institutional transformation of universities.

More than half of the nearly 500,000 school-age Syrian children registered in Lebanon are not enrolled in formal education, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Although Lebanon, which is hosting 1.1 million registered Syrian refugees, has allowed Syrian children to enroll for free in public schools, limited resources and Lebanese policies on residency and work for Syrians are keeping children out of the classroom.

The 87-page report, “‘Growing Up Without an Education’: Barriers to Education for Syrian Refugee Children in Lebanon,” documents the important steps Lebanon has taken to allow Syrian children to access public schools. But Human Rights Watch found that some schools have not complied with enrollment policies, and that more donor support is needed for Syrian families and for Lebanon’s over-stretched public school system. Lebanon is also undermining its positive education policy by imposing harsh residency requirements that restrict refugees’ freedom of movement and exacerbate poverty, limiting parents’ ability to send their children to school and contributing to child labor. Secondary school-age children and children with disabilities face particularly difficult obstacles.

Texas spending on prisons and jails is the highest in the nation, a new federal study concludes, and has grown about five times faster than the state’s rate of spending growth on elementary and secondary education over the past three decades. But the state still spends significantly more on its schools than its prisons.

A new analysis of federal data released last week by the U.S. Department of Education found that Texas corrections spending increased by 850 percent between 1989 and 2013, while the rate of funding for pre-kindergarten to grade 12 education grew by 182 percent. In the 1979-80 fiscal year, for example, Texas spent $14 billion on education and almost $604 million on corrections. In 2013, it spent about $41 billion on schools and $5 billion on incarceration (in constant 2013 dollars).

Search The Fifth Column

Get updates on Facebook

Sections

The Fifth Column is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.